This invention relates generally to systems for reading characters, and more particularly to character reading systems wherein operators are employed to assist in identifying characters which cannot be machine read for making the necessary corrections.
Today's character readers have become more and more sophisticated and both optical character recognition systems and magnetic character recognition systems are used extensively. These systems have become more and more accurate and multiple read stations and error checkings have improved the accuracy of such systems considerably. There still exists, however, situations in which the machine is unable to recognize a character. In such a circumstance, the character reader must notify the operator in some manner that a character has been rejected so that the operator can assist the system in identifying the proper character.
Early systems which failed to recognize a particular character halted the operation of the entire system so that the operator could remove the document, observe the last character presented to the system for recognition, and identify the character which should have been read. The operator then placed the document in a printing position and used a keyboard to supply the system with the correct identification signal. The document would then be re-inserted and the correct character read before the system would continue until the next failure occurred. This, of course, was highly inefficient and made high speed operation impossible.
Several systems of the prior art employed rather complex and sophisticated video equipment which provided the operator with a CRT display of the characters on the document and an indication of the address of a reject character. The operator was able to determine the proper identity of the rejected character and index the proper identifying signal for later re-encoding by the system. This resulted in much greater efficiency but the cost and complexity of such systems is usually prohibitive.